If you work in Local SEO, youíre already familiar with the Pigeon update and the crazy effects itís had on local search results. Itís painfully obvious that the rankings are still fluctuating Ė but maybe thatís a good thing.

Many SEOs have been calling for an end to monthly ranking reports for quite a while now. Unfortunately, clients still see ranking reports as the best indicator of SEO success.

Now that Pigeon has caused havoc with local rankings, weíve got a huge opportunity to take advantage of the flux and educate our clients that rankings donít equal success. All of the Local SEOs can band together, rise up, and show our clients better reports with metrics that really matter to the bottom line.

Re: Can we Really Ditch Ranking Reports due to Pigeon?

BUT - we've had pretty decent success re-educating many of our clients, so they're no longer laser-focused on rankings.

And you're right - the other metrics totally reflect rankings anyway, and will increase/decrease based on rankings.

We've been more successful showing simple reports with numbers they can really see tied to their bottom line. Once they see them, they realize that seeing how they rank for a bajillion random keywords doesn't really prove anything other than how they rank...

Re: Can we Really Ditch Ranking Reports due to Pigeon?

Interesting idea - though looking at his suggestions, I think most people should be doing some of that anyway right now (not not live in a bubble). Given that I don't really trust some of the Google numbers (especially the in sights) while I take those numbers into account, I wouldn't really put all my eggs there.

That being said, throwing out keyword reports, to me, does you no good - both because its what people are use to, a keyword report can help understand site health, and be an good indicator if something is going on with the site, aka keyword dropping helping find a penalty.

All trackers are going through the old datacenters that are still showing the pre-Pigeon results. Even software programs I use that just simply show me when the pack changes - still are all showing the old algo and ranking order. Google Classic maps too.

Mark at Scout thought he found a way around it maybe - using a proxy, but I have not confirmed if it worked yet.

5 Important SEO Metrics You Should Focus on Instead of Rankings

What do you guys think of these metrics? I like the focus on traffic over strictly rankings, because of the fluctuation. One other suggestion is to use custom URLs (use Google URL builder) to set the medium as "Local" and set that as the website URL to the Google My Business page. That way you can do a better job tracking which traffic was true organic and which was because of the local page.

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Re: Can we Really Ditch Ranking Reports due to Pigeon?

Originally Posted by Eric Rohrback

What do you guys think of these metrics? I like the focus on traffic over strictly rankings, because of the fluctuation. One other suggestion is to use custom URLs (use Google URL builder) to set the medium as "Local" and set that as the website URL to the Google My Business page. That way you can do a better job tracking which traffic was true organic and which was because of the local page.

Thanks so much for posting Eric. We started discussing this yesterday, so I had to merge so we would not have a split convo in 2 different places.

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